Comments on: Supreme Court reconsiders rules on lawyer ads http://valawyersweekly.com/2012/11/30/supreme-court-reconsiders-rules-on-lawyer-ads/
VA Lawyers WeeklyWed, 29 Jul 2015 18:01:04 +0000hourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5By: vanhttp://valawyersweekly.com/2012/11/30/supreme-court-reconsiders-rules-on-lawyer-ads/comment-page-1/#comment-31373
vanFri, 30 Nov 2012 19:51:49 +0000http://valawyersweekly.com/?p=71147#comment-31373Disclaimer: I am a partner in a business called Commonwealth Attorney Marketing Service which provides lists of leads to most of Virginia’s top firms that send direct mail. We also prepare letters and other mailpieces for attorneys and mail them to defendants. This eleventh hour stumble plainly works to the detriment of lawyers that have already printed new materials that conform to the suddenly abandoned rules.

The proposed rule modifications have been posted for months, and firms have reasonably relied on those changes in drafting new mailings. Giving lawyers *one day* of notice that the rules are not going to be changed as announced is going to cause a tremendous amount of last second scrambling by firms that now have to destroy countless letters, brochures, and postcards. How unfortunate that so many trees were destroyed for nothing. A survey of mail sent by Virginia lawyers reveals that the rules are apparently very poorly understood if not entirely ignored by many firms, which means that only the attorneys in compliance bear the burden of the rules, while those mailing letters in violation of the rule suffer no consequences at all. Has any Virginia attorney ever been sanctioned for violating the “ADVERTISING MATERIAL” rule? If not, why are those rules still on the books?

It costs a lot of money to print these items, in my case hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. This seems to be an inexcusable waste of money and resources given the fact that these rules changes have been kicking around since Bar Counsel proposed them over a year ago. The rules are a cumbersome and wholly unnecessary anachronism that should have been abolished outright last year. Is this the best we can do? Why in the world should Virginia lawyers be required to shoot ourselves in the foot before we even leave the starting line?

See http://lawyerist.com/two-states-opt-for-sane-lawyer-advertising-rules/ for an article about states that took a look at Advertising Material rules, laughed at the idea of placing themselves at a disadvantage relative to lawyers in other states, and promptly took a strong stand in favor of free speech. How is it that after all parties have had over a year to get this right, the rules changes somehow became unacceptable a day before they were to have been implemented?